Category: Uncategorized

What caused the housing boom?  Did people really believe that a median home price of over $500,000 in San Diego  were realistic?  Were people caught up in the dot-com boom really rational?  Economics 2.0, reviews a paper saying that rational people will often buy assets that they themselves believe are overvalued.  Why? Let’s say I believe that…

Experiment: Airlift 50,000 Yemini Jews to Israel and randomly place them with Israeli families. Finding: Nuture matters.  “We find that children who were placed in a good environment (a home with good sanitary conditions, in a city, and outside of an ethnic enclave) were more likely to achieve positive long-term outcomes. They were more likely to…

I recently read an interesting book titled Economics 2.0.  The book has a Freakonomics pedigree, but reads more like a newspaper or a blog. The benefit of this format is that the authors are able to review a wide variety of economic studies. The downside is there isn’t any real thesis. The book is basically just: “here…

This week my paper on Pharmacists as vaccinators was accepted for publication by the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Benefits.  Co-authored with John Fontanesi, Jan Hirsch, Sarah Lorentz, and Debra Bowers, “Comparison of Pharmacists and Primary Care Providers as Immunizers” examines whether pharmacists are productive and efficient vaccinators.  The abstract of the paper is below.  The…

The Second Anniversary edition of the Cavalcade of Risk has been posted at the always informative InsureBlog. Two especially interesting posts from Cato-at-Liberty and Colorado Health Insurance Insider discuss the individual–compared to the group–health insurance market.

This post will review Han Bleichrodt‘s lecture regarding the micro foundations of using QALY based utility functions. QALYs Many health economists use a QALY model to describe a person’s preference over health states. For instance let (q1,…qτ) be an individuals health profile from year 1 to year τ. The QALY model assumes that utility is…

Below is a summary of Don Kenkel‘s lecture regarding the Economics of Substance Abuse Use. General The World Health Organization and the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) have statistics on the number of drug users around the world. They claim that in 2002 there were 2 billion alcohol users, 1.3 billion smokers, and…

A week ago, we looked at Nichol’s 2003 paper regarding LAIV for healthy working adults. Today we will review the rest of the literature regarding the effectiveness and the economic impact of influenza vaccination for working-aged adults. The seminal work in the literature is written by Nichol and colleagues in the October 1995 edition of…

As a teacher’s assistant at UCSD, I often see undergraduate students selecting courses based on how easy the professor grades rather than on the amount of knowledge they will be able to glean from the course.  Why is this?  Arnold Kling gives a four main reasons in his “College Customers v. Suppliers” post on the…

Today, most news sources’ headline story was “The Day without Immigrants.” From Los Angeles to New York to my hometown of Milwaukee, thousands marched to protest proposed immigration laws. NPR’s Marketplace radio show (“One home, Two nations“) has a wonderful portrayal of two friends–Francisco Castro and Luis Molina–and their decision of whether or not to…